I could pitch my reactions to Neil Jordan’s glorious Breakfast on Pluto as yet another spin on the politics vs. personal desire/domesticity discussion, or as a glam-rock rejoinder (or alternative chorus) to Brokeback‘s mournful fiddle, or simply say:
It’s the most fun I have had at the movies all year. (Tied, if I’m totally honest, with Kung Fu Hustle, but its pleasures are very, very different.) The soundtrack is perfect, the images saturated with color, the performances stellar. And it’s moving, funny, thrilling. I’m torn between wanting to read the novel or just see the film again.
now that simon is in new york (he doesn’t want to see it: don’t ask), i’ll definitely go!
I don’t entirely know what to make of Breakfast on Pluto. Yes, the soundtrack, the cinematography (images so saturated in color I felt compelled to rush out and buy a 42″ plasma screen), the talking robins quoting Oscar Wilde (Reynolds didn’t mention that bit did he). And it is a moving and often funny film (thrilling . . . I’ll leave that for Mike to unpack). I liked the first 30 minutes and the last 45 minutes but found I lost my way during the middle 45 minutes (particularly when Miss Kitten joins a most tragic magic show or finds her way onto the front pages as a “killer queen” while being beaten to a glorious pulp in a London jailhouse). It’s really quite conventional this film–a picaresque “boy searching for his mommy” narrative–but it’s missing the dire, surrealistic beauty that made Jordan’s The Butcher Boy such a superior film. That being said, Cillian Murphey is quite remarkable. Now, as to the personal politics of domestic identity vs. the post-colonial politics of national identity . . . well, that sounds like a great paper for the Midwest MLA, but I found all the IRA stuff to be superfluous. “Serious, serious” indeed. Perhaps that’s the point.
MY COMMENT; EDITED AND COMPLETED
i just watched this and absolutely loved it. this films shoots to the top of my best-of-2005 list. cillian murphy is great (don’t watch the extra in which he says with a superior tone of voice and a bored look that acting all the gay stuff was a challenge for him, though) and the directing is great. i am not sure how to politicize this film. maybe its beauty lies in its resistance to politicization. a reviewer said that kitten embodies the queen stereotype of flamboyancy as a defence mechanism. maybe. but there is some genuine joyfulness and buoyancy to kitten, a resilience and trust in life that convince beyond the stereotype.
i didn’t find the magic show bit, or any other bit, tragic. i found kitten as if lit with inner light, and capable of spreading light even in a brutal english interrogation room at the heights of the IRA bombings. his light infects everyone: his father, the band leader (don’t remember his name), his unknowing half-brother, the sad magician, the cops, charlie. he is a little redemptive force in really hard times.
the harshness of the times is represented not only by political violence but also by sexual confusion and heartbreak. surprisingly, kitten’s flamboyant homosexuality attracts very little if no homophobia in the film. the only real opposition to his queer ways takes place in his adoptive family and his catholic school, and pretty mildly at that. in his little town, kitten moves undisturbed, surrounded by a small group of faithful and loving friends. there is no sense of persecution when he gets into london, either. occasionally, people puzzle a bit over his gender identity, then move on. it’s as if his queerness were below everyone’s radar screen.
[SPOILERS] sexual confusion is played out in the liam neeson character, who is tortured by his accidental fatherhood and by regret over his lost love. it is finally kitten who brings him redemption. when kitten, charlie, and the father live together under one roof, and especially when the father saves kitten and charlie from the fire that destroys his church, a bond of love beyond rigid moral (political? presumably the same people who set the church on fire are bombing the rest of the english isles as well) boundaries is formed and the characters rise above their feelings of abandonment and sadness, looking towards the future rather than at the past.
i like films that use religion to challenge religious taboos. i think this is one of them. it is no coincidence that this film came out at the tail end of the priests’ sex abuse scandal and smack in the middle of the catholic church’s attack on homosexuality. watching this film, one wonders why kitten and his ilk should be marginalized by the church while sexually abusive priests (not father bernard’s case) should be allowed to, at the very least, continue being priests (if not work in the community). [SPOILER] father bernard’s sexual “error” seems much more devasting for himself and the world than kitten’s homosexuality, which neil jordan represents as exceedingly chaste and sexually unthreatening.
which may prompt some discussion: why is kitten so a-sexual? he’s much keener on tenderness and attention than sex, and, in fact, there isn’t the slightest indication in the film of sexual activity on his part. discuss.
I found the magic show tragic due to Stephen Rea’s character/performance. I think Kitten’s asexuality is a really good topic for discussion. The cynic in me feels as if the filmmakers didn’t want to push the audience too much. If Kitten stands for some kind of Irish national identity, then making him sexual is problematic (Gio have you read At Swim, Two Boys?). Perhaps Murphey and Jordan didn’t really want to go there. It is definately a flaw, leaving me dazzled by the film’s light/colorful touch even as I prefer the darker and more broody The Crying Game.
i have considered reading at swim, two boys several times, on your recommendation, but i need something more to go on before i embark on the project (so many books…!). wanna write a paragraph or two on textualities?
A couple of quick takes/responses:
I’m glad you loved it, Gio–it’s at the top of my list, too.
–Comedy: tying in with your post on White, we might untangle how comedy avoids the “serious” without simply or only refuting politics. Kitten (and the film) is particularly conscious and critical of the way seriousness (in the small-town’s moral code, the church’s or school’s institutional authority, the political ideologies ostensibly resisting authority) is so personally costly, so consequentially destructive of freedoms. Yet Kitten doesn’t simply “escape” into frivolity, doesn’t simply put on a happy heavily-mascara-ed face and ignore all the destructiveness. She offers another way of being in this world; comedy as a metaphysical performance. And (as in the best comedy) this worldview is not about punishment for transgressions–it’s about the generous and inclusive and redemptive hope for personal and communal reconstruction.
–Asexuality. I think Kitten is in line with all of author Patrick McCabe’s protagonists. (McCabe wrote this novel, and _The Butcher Boy_, and _Call Me the Breeze_, and a couple others that I haven’t read. He also pops up in this film as Peepers, the school teacher so incensed by Kitten’s freewriting.) These heroes are so caught up in defining themselves against/around/within worlds so perversely intent on destroying them (or at the very least whittling their selves away, ’til they conform). In some ways, they are (tragically) incapable of sexual intimacy because either they are caught up in protective world-views that keep them safe by keeping them from others, or they find in sexual relations various destructive repetitions of the powers they are trying to escape.
Kitten seems to fall into the latter. Remember that she does seek to have sex, admittedly for money–and is first almost killed then later simply exploited. And I see her relationship with Rea as sexual, too… I can’t quite recall, but I think it’s made more explicit (and comically so) in the novel, but theirs is a serious and reciprocal intimacy in the film (even without the fornicatin’ shown to us). There does seem to be some hope for a sexuality that is accepted and loved–Rea says, in a wonderful and gloriously comic double entendre, he’s always wanted a woman like Kitten.
–I don’t get how Kitten’s sexuality or even just her gendered performance is “problematic”. I’d suggest that McCabe and Jordan are pushing lots of Irish buttons with Kitten, and in a lovely little irony her sexual/gendered identity is less threatening to Irish nationalism than her critique of IRA politics. (And this is in line with most of McCabe’s characters, who resist or outright mock “the troubles.”) McCabe is writing around or outside the traditions of Irish literature–where writing an Irish novel seems to demand some serious (serious) attention to the political conflicts; McCabe’s trying to broaden, open up the depictions of Irish culture, and he’s a corrosive but ultimately generous critic of that culture.
Just saw a couple of John Millington Synge plays performed by Druid Theatre (first professional theatre company in Ireland outside Dublin) and directed by artisitc director Garry Hynes. The plays opened the architecturally adventurous new Guthrie Theatre here in Milltown. Hynes brought six plays with her and co., but I only saw two (The Shadow of the Glen and Playboy of the Western World). Interesting how both of these plays resist or outright mock British imperialism AND Gaelic sentimentality (also interesting that Cillian Murphey played Christy Mahon in the original Druid production though, obviously, he did not participate in the national tour). Playboy was written in 1907 but accomplishes exactly what Reynolds describes above.
Okay–sure: mocking Irish sentimentality is also part of the Irish canon–whether Synge or McCabe or O’Brien or O’Brien or McDonagh or… the list goes on.
That said, with the struggles of the ’80s and through the peace process in the early ’90s, it became not just common practice but high-holy-obligation to sidestep such self-critique, to start trying to find a cohesive common cultural story or myth. Roddy Doyle took a load of abuse for his _Star Called Henry_, with its disruptive sarcasm about “Irish” unity (at the ostensible peak moment of such cultural cohesion in 1916). People–the public press, the high-literary lights (like Seamus Deane) ripped into the book; when we were there, most people noted that writers like Doyle (and Edna O’Brien, and Martin McDonagh) are given some grudging due for their great off-island reputations but are generally less beloved at home. McCabe is in that ‘new’ strain of revisionism, unwilling to play along with the then- (and still-)common sentiments demanding a move past divisiveness and into a stronger shared National narrative. So, again, I think the movie has more political oomph or edge in Ireland than we might consider from abroad….
By way of contrast, Ken Loach’s new film (with C. Murphy)–which has I gather been very well-received in Eire–is EXACTLY the kind of pro-Ireland, anti-England story that McCabe (and McDonagh, et al.) tend to deride.
Having just posted on Transamerica, I have to follow up to say that this movie (despite the interesting political angle) is a maddening cliche. Basically Kitten comes off as a dim-witted, inscrutable, happy-because-he’s-simple-despite -his-penchant-for-dressing-in-women’s-clothing kind of character. I found this portrait to be unhuman; in fact I was upset after seeing this film. I thought the worst part was what some of you wrote about, his asexuality. We don’t see any kind of desire on Kitten’s part; he’s there for others only. He’s happy if others coddle him; unhappy and pained if they discard him or abuse him. He does manage to bounce back, but this wasn’t enough for me. Maybe he is purely symbolic in this movie, as part of a political allegory or some gesture toward existence of goodness in the world–but at the expense of his own humanity? Here’s a transgenered character who seems to be exploited by the very movie that stages him.
kitten, dim-witted? but the guy’s sharp as a razor! and he bursts with desire: for closeness, men, beautiful clothes, a female figure with which to identify, a father to be loved by. his happy-go-lucky attitude, i suggested, is a coping mechanism, flamboyancy as a survival technique, and it does indeed serve him well in the fabulistic world of the film. i don’t think he’s abused, either. he’s very much loved, no?
i don’t know if this is what sunhee is getting at but what desires kitten may or may not have are almost entirely unphysical. he is almost asexual, almost theoretically liminal. there’s a lot of fancy clothing but the body is almost entirely missing. this may work for the film’s approach to big p politics but is somewhat problematic as a representation of a transgendered person.
personally, i found the character’s happy-go-lucky attitude to be almost affect-less in its flamboyance, almost psychopathically so.
I agree with arnab
oh, yes, i do agree that kitten’s body is not there. good point. it’s so not there that he/she is incredibly thin. and when she’s required to expose her body (in the peep show), she’s totally not into it, not a bit.
and yes, the flamboyance is detached. which behooves a defence mechanism, no?
are you back, jeff?!?
It’s been a while since I’ve seen this, so remind me of Kitten’s intelligence; I don’t remember much of it. What I do remember is that the film provides blank spaces in which we can insert our readings of Kitten as perhaps inwardly understanding of her environment, desiring certain things, a father for instance. But I still don’t think that he is portrayed by the film as a thinking and desiring individual. For instance, when the political situation becomes dicy, does Kitten in any scene actually converse with the issues? Or in the scenes dealing with his father, what desire does he express? Sure, much may be happening inwardly, it must! But this isn’t really expressed in the film. Perhaps there’s desire generally but because all is very detached it is impersonal too–not really about him. And I can see that the detachment could be a kind of defence mechnism but I am wary of this kind of psychological reading.
sunhee, i sympathize with your wariness about liking a character that seems so empty, especially given the fact that it’s a transgender character.
kitten seems very smart to me because she’s very quick, witty, and sarcastic.
and yes, you’re right, she is removed from the political scene — maybe a commentary of its brutishness? kitten doesn’t like brutish, unrefined things.
okay, how about this: she desires a mother; she desires the love (if not the body) of her first boyfriend (the band leader); she knows she doesn’t love the magician (she’s not removed from that); she’s happy when the father takes her in; she loves her friends; she’s moved by the kindness of her little father. but yes yes yes, she isn’t sexual. she just isn’t.
i think what gives kitten her charge as a character, and notorious aesthete reynolds his thrill as a viewer, is a refusal of dirty-details politics. what is strange is that this refusal which is grounded in a flamboyant performance of the body should be so uninterested in the body as well. no politics, no sex–all we have left is an obsession with the missing mother. i think of something like hedwig and the angry inch as being very similar (from what i remember of it) but that film is so much more effective because hedwig is much more of a subject than kitten is.
Arnab, what I am is a “dandy,” not an aesthete.
I wrote this lovely, supremely-persuasive response while in Seattle, then lost it. So here is a more blunt version of same, from Canandaigua, New York:
Asexual? Whadda you guys want, penetration? Did you need to see sweaty bodies to see that Kitten desired? Kitten is very concerned with her body, a fact implicit in Murphy’s every movement–this was not, for me anyway, a return to cliched cross-dressing swish (a la Swayze et al. in Wong Foo), but a more controlled, even (some say) icily-reserved physical and emotional performance.
As to sex, Kitten (as Gio noted) has explicitly physical, sensual, sexual relations with her singer–and, while more (ahem) middle-aged, I got the same sense from her love for the magician. But this story is focalized through Kitten’s eyes, and the sex is thus represented (or, rather, not actually represented) in the manner of the films she adores–those ‘fifties confections where sex is signified by sweeping emotions and arch comments. We are given the cues/clues about how to read Kitten’s approach to sex by the story she tells of her miraculous conception: rather than sweaty bodies, she imagines the Father father in a dirty joke, flying through the air at the sight of fishnets. And maybe it’s me, but I don’t think she was scorning or caustically imagining–I think she thought that was lovely.
But I think Kitten’s smart because while she thinks it’s lovely, she also knows that it would get the teacher’s scorn. Peepers grabs her ear, drags her out of class, and she gets to perform her resistance to the conformities around her yet again. When she is being beaten in the police house, her fantasy of spying is not simply some escape, the Gumpish blitheness to a brutal reality–it’s a nuanced way to live and imagine life on her own terms. By this I mean the fantasy keeps her from falling too deeply into despair at the brutality she’s enduring; further, it has a resonant effect on those around her, seducing (if you will) the police to her side. Kitten’s politics are to tell a different kind of story than is being told. If she explicitly resisted, or fought back against the IRA or British politics, she’d get wrapped up in *that* kind of story–instead, by sticking to her gunless importance, she’s trying to tell her way out of the grim realities of Irish (smalltown constrictedness, family disintegration, political strife) life and into what she desires — as Gio noted, the intimacies of family.
Hedwig’s a really intriguing point of comparison, because H’s politics are seemingly more explicit… yet, as I recall, in that film too there is an explicit recoding of geopolitical realities (in that case, the Berlin Wall) into signs of the sexual, gendered reality Hedwig desires.